The CMO: A Real 'Sense of Urgency'

The newly-empowered customer is spurring much change across the marketing scene, not least a major burnishing of chief marketing officer's role.

Such is the conclusion of a whitepaper just out from Deliotte Consulting Services. "From Mad Man to Superwoman" provides a good back-of-the-envelope history of the marketing profession. But it goes on to make an interesting claim: CMOs have succeeded in strengthening and repositioning their perceived role within companies, in effect marketing the value of marketing itself. In the digital era of social media that gives the customer increasing influence, effective and efficient marketing is proving essential to business success.

Suketu Ghandi, principal at Deloitte and one of the paper's authors, said:

As consumers are more technically, socially and behaviorally engaged, the CMO needs to understand intimacy at scale. In the online economy, to grow share, you have to really understand customers... The tools that emerged in this period -- the graphical user interface (GUI), click-through advertising, display ads, e-commerce and search -- all derived their strength from providing a new experience for the customer. Well before the dawn of Web 2.0, we heard the mantra that the customer was in charge.

The authors note that the term "CMO" coincides with the rise of the Web as an important customer-facing channel.

Along with the new role, CMOs have had to acquire whole new skills, specifically in the areas of strategy, metrics, and analytics.

"In addition to the Web, we have mobility, analytics and social coming together in ways that didn't exist 10 years ago," Ghandi said. Marketers always have tried to read the tea leaves. The difference today is, "you now have 50 terabytes of tea leaves." Rather than making obsolete the kind of inspired intuition about customers that's often associated with Don Draper, "you'll now have facts associated with it," Ghandi added.

Happily, the Deliotte writers don't short-change the importance of the technology and the CMO's interactions with his or her IT counterparts.

The importance of technology in the execution of today's marketing has created a sense of urgency for this alliance. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this point came recently in a Gartner report that stated that by 2017, "an organization's CMO may have a bigger 'IT' budget than the CIO."

Could all this account for the lengthening tenure of CMOs at their jobs in the last couple of years? The Deloitte authors note that in the firm's 2010 CMO survey, Spencer Stuart, a headhunting firm, reported that the average CMO tenure "rose by an astounding 14 months-to a new record of 42 months."

And then?
Wondering if this statistic could just be an artifact of the deep recession and continued economic sluggishness, Ghandi noted that in the same period, CEO tenure has gone down and CIO tenure has flattened out.

What comes next? According to the authors, it is the "network-driven empowerment of individuals," which includes the rise of social media but also refers to digital ties inside and between companies. This, they say, may be the disruption driving the current CMO era, which they call the "postdigital" era.

"If the CMO owns the disruption, great things can happen. If not, woe to the CMO," they write.

What characterizes this new generation of CMOs? For Ghandi, these men and women will be part marketer, part technologist, and part neuroscientist.

John, there have been noted cases where unhappy customers leveraged social media to voice their complaint and companies have responded quickly and effectively. In one case I recently read, the complainant further messaged on social media their satisfaction about the resolution to the issue. It is an opportunity for corporations to support customers, but only if they are interested in doing so.

Yes, and I suppose that it's more likely that customers with problems and negative things to say will be more likely to post comments, as payback for what they feel is a wrong, while those who feel they got their money's worth and are happy will not bother.

John, the good companies are continually monitoring and looking for comments, positive and negative, and then responding accordingly. The negative ones provide more of a challenge, as you may ignite a significant backlash by your approach or tone.

@John - I don't agree that experience is no longer relevant. We are living in very dynamic and fluid times. Analytics which focuses on the past can't always predict the future, so experience in dealing in previous unsettled times can play a positive role.

John, that is one of the things that I wrestle with. How can a corporation be truly 'intimate' with a prospect or customer when they have thousands or millions to contend with? Unless you throw a lot of bodies at this issue, it is difficult to scale that intimacy.

@WaqasAltaf - social media has also moved control of branding away from corporations and to customers. The social media tools offer consumers great powers in redefining a brand. Gone are the days that corporate marketing could leverage one-way communications vehicles to overpower the market and define their brand.

The proliferation of smartphones and tablet devices presents new opportunities and challenges for marketers to reach customers where they are and when they’re ready to buy. Apps, the mobile Web, social check-ins, geofencing, and mobile ad standards are among the tools marketers need to master in this new world. Learn how to use new mobile technology effectively and avoid its hazards.

Is a massive, three-day industry event featuring A-list speakers like Bill Clinton and Malcolm Gladwell the right approach for a company seeking to generate awareness of its brand? Steve thinks that goes part of the way, but if brands want their names to stick they need to build communities.

CMOs rely on aggregate data for customer preferences and are missing the opportunity to get one-on-one information through social media and other resources, according to a study of 1,734 CMOs conducted by IBM. Watch a Webinar presenting the findings, and get a copy of the report for yourself.

"Moneyball," the new Brad Pitt baseball movie, is one every marketer should see. It's not just about relying on metrics and analytics over gut feelings, it's also about relying on the right metrics and analytics.